We will all be in Cali for the next week, so it’s travellin’ time again.  Some of you will see us, other, no doubt, will not be so, uh, fortunate.

I have downloaded Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell in audiobook format. I will be listening to it on the plane (when not trying to placate bored, frustrated children) and in the car (when not trying to placate bored, frustrated children). I’m a little behind on this; it does sound interesting in a “well, duh” kind of way. Hoping to take away some concepts that can be applied to other areas of my life (photography, writing, usability, etc.).

The wife is taking the kids to Chattanooga for her niece’s graduation and a few nights with the cousins so we don’t have to worry about child care for her first show in Nashville.

An out-of-town wife means one thing.

Star Wars.

I’m a few days behind on this, but I highly recommend listening to the May 9th episode of This American Life. It’s a TAL look at the stories behind the sub-prime/housing/credit crisis. It has the same elements of all the economic crises in recent years: tragedy of the commons, the few making obscene profits at the expense and suffering of others, neglected warning signs, fallacious thinking that went unquestioned, and of course, far-reaching implications that no one considered because they were getting rich in the short term.

One might think that we as a society would learn this lesson after The Great Depression, the S&L Scandal, Enron and the deregulation of the California electric grid, the dot com bubble, and the current gas crisis. But I’ve never been accused of optimism.

I posted an update over at California Diaspora, my blog about living in the south. This week, it’s about the highway patrol.

Apologies for the dearth of recent posts. I’m working a lot on other projects in my off time. For now, I am going to suggest reading the essay Lies We Tell Kids by Paul Graham. Plenty of things to think about, you probably won’t agree with them all, but that’s why we read, yes? Plenty of pithy snippets, but I’ll highlight this one:

If parents told their kids the truth about sex and drugs, it would be: the reason you should avoid these things is that you have lousy judgement. People with twice your experience still get burned by them. But this may be one of those cases where the truth wouldn’t be convincing, because one of the symptoms of bad judgement is believing you have good judgement. When you’re too weak to lift something, you can tell, but when you’re making a decision impetuously, you’re all the more sure of it.

Go read it.

“History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”
-Karl Marx

I have long been trying to decide where the natural philosophy of Children, or perhaps my children, falls.  I am certain they are not strict Nihilists, Rationalists or Empiricists, which I find notable. I do pick up some Descartes from the eldest, but I probably see more Existentialism from them than any other single school of thought. Some Platonic concepts show up too.  For example, children’s ability to use experience with, say, trees to learn to identify other types of trees, and distinguish them from shrubs reminds me strongly of Plato’s World of Forms, or at least a parallel psychological construct.

I am very interested in input on this topic, so please let me know what you think.